El Greco, A View of Toledo. ca. 1598-99, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Everyone knows the name “El Greco.” He is one of those rare Old Masters who, like his seventeenth-century Netherlandish colleagues Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer, is both widely recognized and widely admired today. The agile, attenuated figures and solemn, bearded men who populate his canvases are unmistakable; so are the super-heated, jewel-like colors, the crackling highlights, and the dramatic darks that animate his pictures, all of which conspire to make El Greco’s work easy to identify and, to eyes informed by modernism, immensely appealing. His highly charged paintings, with their expressively exaggerated forms and intense moods, still speak to us directly and forcefully.

Yet El Greco died four hundred years ago, in 1614, in his adopted city of Toledo. To celebrate this anniversary, numerous commemorative exhibitions were organized in Spain during 2014. American museums with rich holdings of El Greco’s works, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery in Washington, sent many paintings to these shows, all but emptying their own walls. Those works have now returned home and, as a result, a New World El Greco festival on this side of the Atlantic has been organized. Concurrent exhibits—“El Greco in New York” at the Met and “El Greco at the National Gallery and Washington-Area Collections: A 400th Anniversary Celebration” in Washington, plus the Frick Collection’s installation of its three fine pictures (which never travel)—bear witness